He’s dressed unusually well for this bus route: white business shirt, carefully ironed khakis and polished black shoes. He looks so out of place I can’t help but wonder if he’s knocking on doors to talk about his religion. Do I want him to be a missionary?
No. No, I think I’d rather he was a bright young staffer for a conservative politician. I want to be his dirty secret, the queer girl he knows he shouldn’t be around, the one he’s always trying to end things with, except every time she comes around and gives him that sexy little smirk he gets weak and sins again. The girl who shows up at the worst possible times, knocking on his door just because she saw his priest sitting on the living room couch. He’ll answer the door and try to shoo me away, unable to pull his eyes away from the shadow between my breasts, the little edge of lace poking out above my shirt. I’ll smile down at the outline of the stiffening cock inside his khakis and say, “You don’t want to go back and speak to the padre with that sticking out for all the world to see, now do you? Tell him you have to step out for a minute, and I’ll take care of that for you,” punctuating the word with a gentle tap on its rounded peak. He’ll hesitate, quivering with excitement, voice tangled in his throat, and then at last he’ll turn to look back up the hall and say in a hoarse voice, “Eh-excuse me for a moment, Father…”
I realize I’m staring just as he looks up from his book at me and I try to look away like I’m staring out the window. Stupid, stupid, god, he’ll think I’m a total creep now.
I look away just in time to see a pudgy man with greasy blond hair staring at my tits. He looks up and tries to cover: “Uh, I love your shirt, ma’am! What’s the picture mean?” I get asked this question every time I wear my super-trans T-shirt—a red and yellow trans symbol on a blue background like a Superman T-shirt. I feel like I should just start handing out FAQs.
Q: What’s the picture mean?
A: It’s a transgender symbol.
Q: Yeah? What’s a “transgender?”
A: It’s an umbrella term that includes folks like transsexuals and cross-dressers and—
Q: So, like, men who become women? Like gay guys who’ve had the surgery so they can do it like women, right?
A: Uhh…kind of…um, I guess…
And for the first time he looks at my face in earnest, rather than just politely diverting his attention from my breasts, and something in his eyes changes and I can see the usual followup question condensing on his lips for a long moment before it finally emerges as he points at my chest.
Q: Those ain’t real, are they?
A: No, you’re imagining them.
He squints at me and puckers his lips skeptically, looking from my breasts to my face and back again. Then he turns to the dark-eyed man and taps him on the shoulder. Dark Eyes lifts his handsome face out of the book. The creep leans in close and stage-whispers, “Hey, man, hey…lookit that over there. You wouldn’t do it with one of those, would ya?”
“Me? Oh, no, I’m straight.”
That’s the way it always is: no I’m straight, no I’m gay. Lesbians who only like cis women and trans men, or straight men afraid that touching me will mean they can’t call themselves straight anymore. There’s always only one meaning: whatever it is you are, I’m not into that. Natalie and I have an open relationship, but because she passes for cis and I don’t, her end of the relationship tends to be more open than mine.
She swears the difference is that she’s butch and I’m femme, and I’m what people expect to see when they see a transsexual woman. “Take my word for it,” she teases, “we shave off all that pretty red hair and no one will ever read you as trans again.” She’s only messing with me when she says that, of course. She wouldn’t say that if she thought I’d do it.
She’s not afraid of not passing like I am either. I remember one time when some teenage boy leaned out the window of his car and shouted “Hey, trannies! Show me your cocks!” And I just wanted to sink into the bench we were sitting on and disappear, but Natalie rose to her feet, raised her middle finger and screamed, “GROW ONE!”
Coming home to her is a joy, coming home to her is a relief. She’s fierce and fearless and tender and sweet, and with no family left after I came out, no hometown that I’m welcome in, my home is wherever she is. Home is the woman who knows I’m beautiful, the beautiful woman who loves me.
I walk through the door to find her waiting for me in the dark on the couch. All the windows are open and the air conditioner is off. The air is so thick you could reach out and pull off big, soft bites of it. Everything is electric; the sky is getting ready to open up and give us all relief. Three little white candles are lined up along the top of the television, and she’s in the shadows just at the edge where the shivering light turns into darkness.
She’s wearing jeans—how can she wear jeans in this weather?—and a white tank top, both stained and streaked with paint. The Collected Poems of Pablo Neruda and a tube of lubricant are on the floor by the sofa, neither of which was there this morning.
I set down the wine, cross the floor to where she is and curl into her, my head on her shoulder. I brush my fingers through her short, spiky hair and kiss her cheek. “No power?” I ask, though I knew the electricity was out as soon as I stepped off the bus. You can always tell when the electricity in our neighborhood is out, because all the people who never see or speak to one another spill out into the street all at once as if some invisible hand pulled a lever that raised one end of every floor in the neighborhood, dumping all of them out their front doors.
The Puerto Rican family next door had been having a party when the electrical fire started at the fast-food franchise around the corner from us. The parents are all leaning over the porch rails holding onto dripping beer bottles while their children run back and forth across the pavement, chattering excitedly and pointing at the fire trucks and police cars. The elderly man across the street who shakes his head and murmurs, “Homosexual sex freak,” every time he sees me is ignoring the incident completely, standing in his front yard with his son staring up at the enormous American flag stretched across the front of his house, and not talking. The college students are downstairs smoking on the steps and debating whether to stay here and wait it out, or go to someone else’s house and see if they can catch the end of the football game.
“No power,” Natalie shrugs. “Hope you weren’t planning to cook anything fancy for dinner.” I think of the steak marinating in the fridge and wonder how well cold Spaghetti-O’s go with merlot.
“Well, I’m glad you’re home. I missed you a lot.” I reach up and kiss her on the cheek. “I’m sorry things didn’t go well out west.”
She looks away. “It’s fine. She’s marrying some cis dude and they’re going to be monogamous, and I’m sure she’ll be very happy with a house and kids and whatever. She’ll probably never say the word ‘bisexual’ out loud again.” She runs her fingers idly through my hair and sighs. “Whatever, I don’t really want to talk about it. I’m just happy to be home.”
“Well, how do you want to spend your first night back? I had a steak and a Humphrey Bogart movie all ready for us, but I guess that’s not happening.”
“I appreciate the thought,” she says. “But now it’s all dark and we’ll have to entertain ourselves some other way.” She looks down at the floor. “Hey! Did you notice that there was conveniently placed lube by our feet?”
I laugh and kiss her cheek. “Babe, you are so corny.”
“Oh, okay. Well, if fucking you silly is corny, I guess I could read you my thesis on Jackson Pollock. Hang on, I’ll go get it,” she says, rising slightly from the couch.
I leap across the sofa and grab her around the middle. “Hey, hey, hey, get back here!” I kiss her and say, “You’re lucky I think corny is cute.”
She laughs and sits back down on the couch. “You’re lucky you think corny is cute. Do you know how boring my thesis is?” She gives me that cocky smile like she knows I can’t resist her, and when she gives me
that smile, I can’t. I straddle her lap and lean in to kiss her. She reaches up and runs her nails back and forth across the back of my neck. She lays her palm across my left breast and gently pushes me away, her wrist covering the bottom fork of the transgender symbol.
She leans up and kisses me on the ear and whispers, “Take that silly thing off.”
I roll off and lean back against the arm of the couch, coyly defiant. “I didn’t hear a ‘please.’”
She wraps her hand around my wrist and pulls my hand in close to the stiff bulge in her jeans.
“Silly girl,” she says. “‘Please’ is your line.”
“Oh!” I gasp crookedly. My mouth is suddenly dry with desire; I want her so much it’s hard to speak. “So it is.” My fingers creep up the little hill to the prize, the brass tag of her zipper peeking out of the front of her jeans. My index finger just barely touches the little hard piece of metal before she jumps backward and up, plopping herself down on the arm of the couch and crossing her legs.
“Excuse me,” she says, scowling over the top of her little round glasses. “I’m pretty sure I told you to take your shirt off, young lady.” Too excited now for coy denials, I grab the bottom hem of my T-shirt and pull it off so hastily that I smear a pale streak of foundation makeup down the middle of the transgender symbol. I toss it away and it vanishes into the darkness. “Good girl!” she smiles. “You don’t need that here.”
Outside, four news vans pull up at once, and four camera operators with their hats on backward leap out in sync. They begin setting up as close as they can, but the street near the fire itself is clogged with emergency vehicles and police are keeping them back while the firefighters work, so they set up across the street from our apartment. I can see them out of the corner of my eye, pulling off their lens caps and looking around at the crowd, deciding which neighbor to talk to.
I reach behind myself to unhook my bra, and Natalie, who doesn’t wear one, tugs off her white tank top. She uncrosses her legs and I rise to my knees between them, pressing my mouth to the tiny curves of her breasts. “Mmm, good girl,” she murmurs. She laces her fingers into my hair and balls her fist, clutching my head tightly to her chest. Another switch flips on inside me, the machinery of my need for her crackling and shivering in the dark like vacuum tubes in Frankenstein’s lab.
I pull away and fumble with the button on my shorts. “Hmm. Someone’s a little eager,” Natalie says, propping her elbows on her knees and her chin on her knuckles. “What are you in such a hurry for, little girl? What is it you want so badly?” I drop my shorts on the floor and lean back with one knee bent slightly inward to hide my clit, which has stiffened without my consent as usual.
“You,” I whisper. “I want you inside me, I want you to fuck me, I want you to fuck my ass, I want to come ’til I’m crying…” She’s still sitting there watching me, smiling just a little but not saying anything. She’s waiting for me to say something specific. I know what it is. “I want your cock,” I say, almost too quiet to hear over the noise outside.
“Sorry? I didn’t quite hear that.”
“Your cock,” I say, a little louder but not so loud that someone in the next room would hear. “I want your cock.”
“Shout it,” she says, tugging down her zipper. “Shout it and you can have it.”
“I can’t—” I start to say, glancing back at the open windows behind us, but she begins to pull her zipper up and the words burst out of my mouth, “Cock! I want your cock! Please, please, fuck me, I want you inside me, please!” I crane my neck around to look out the window behind me and can see the reporters glancing at our building. The old man’s son is looking too, and he turns to answer a question the old man just asked. This is probably not going to help the “sex freak” rumors, but right now I don’t care too much. Later I’ll care, but right now all that really matters is Natalie, her lips and hair and breasts and her beautiful cock. She pulls open her jeans and it pops out, she isn’t wearing underpants. I jump up and crane my neck toward it, but she puts a hand on my shoulder to stop me.
“Condom,” she says, and I panic. Do we have any left? We used the last one in the bedroom before we left, where could we have had more? Is there one under the couch, is there one in my purse, is there one in a drawer in the kitchen? Nothing seems likely. I look at her and she’s grinning. “Relax,” she says, “you look like you’re going to pop.” She pulls one out of the pocket of her jeans. “I always have a spare in my wallet. I might not have been a boy, but I was a Boy Scout. ‘Be prepared.’” She taps the knee of her jeans. “Take care of these for me while I put this thing on, pretty girl.”
I grab her pants and tug, slowly revealing her long, gorgeous legs; the sparse layer of wiry black hair, dry knees, the little ridge of scar on her calf where she sliced herself on broken glass as a child swimming in the creek that everyone’s parents told them to stay out of.
I drop her jeans into the shadows, and I’m about to lean up to put my head between her thighs, but instead she drops to the couch between my legs and lowers herself onto me, her lips on my lips, her breasts on my breasts, her cock on my clit. She kisses down the side of my neck and then back up to my ear and whispers, “Admit it: you like telling the world what a slut you are.” I press my body against hers and don’t say anything, but she’s not wrong. “Maybe they already knew. Maybe I told them. You don’t speak Spanish, you don’t know what I say to the people next door.” She presses herself down onto me. “Maybe you’re too beautiful not to talk about.”
She reaches down into my panties and slides the flat of her palm over my clit, covering it completely, one finger gently stroking the closed space between my thighs. I gasp and squirm and above me, shadowing the light, she’s watching me approvingly. She cups her other hand around my left breast, pinching my nipple until it crosses the line between sexy and sore, then easing up just enough to cross back, then slides her hand slowly across the curve of my belly. A thunderstorm is sliding into place inside me, her hands drawing cloud-shadows across my skin. The air tastes electric, the darkness is vibrating at the edges as the candle flickers and exhales a string of smoke at the ceiling.
Shivering, I reach down for the lube, pop the cap and squeeze a cold dollop into my hand. I’m sweating, my face is soaked and the makeup that hides my facial hair is probably ruined, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter here.
Sliding my cold hand back and forth across her warm cock, I raise myself up and kiss her neck. “I love you so much,” I moan, “you don’t even know.” She sighs and finally lets herself go, lets out a murmur of pleasure.
“Turn over,” she says, and I yank my panties off as fast as I can and obey. She squirts some lube into her palm and gently grasps my clit, lining up her cock with her other hand. In the flickering light I can see us reflected in the screen of the television across the room.
A stranger looking at us now would call us “MTFs” instead of women, would name us by our genitalia—“pre-op,” “non-op”—would call us trans before they called us anything else, if they did call us anything else. A stranger would call our bodies gender ambiguous: her cock about to enter me, my clit poking out of her fist, her tiny breasts on her large rib cage and the shadow across my cheeks and chin. A stranger would say that, and that stranger would be wrong: our bodies aren’t ambiguous at all, only the meanings people misapply to them. She’s a woman and her beautiful body is a woman’s body; I am a woman and seeing how beautiful her body is makes me think my body might be beautiful too.
She begins to press into me, creeping in by agonizing millimeters. I want to push back, push her all the way in, but I let her control the pace. She slides a fingernail down my spine and rubs the palm of her hand over the head of my clit. Her hips meet my ass and she reaches around with her free hand to hold my breasts as I clutch the arm of the couch, whimpering with joy.
I want to come while the media people still have their microphones on, to scream Natalie’s name on the six o’cloc
k news. I want to show the world that I’m not afraid, that I’m exactly what they say I am and also that I’m not, and if they can only see one of those two that’s their problem. Natalie is kissing the back of my neck and her cock is deep inside me. Manic birds are chattering to one another in the trees outside, announcing a thunderstorm coming to break the heat. The partiers next door are drunkenly singing; their children have been called inside. Reporters are taking reactions from the neighbors, cameras rolling. Out of the soup of language, two words keep rising from the street: fire, electricity, fire, electricity.
Natalie pulls me in close, presses herself all the way inside me, and together we build a better world.
SOMEBODY’S WATCHING ME
Alicia E. Goranson
Amanda is out watching the sun set between the two ramshackle houses across the street, waiting for Naoto to come over. Then her cell phone chimes. It’s Derrick, her exboyfriend from three states ago. The one she left at midnight after he had fallen asleep. He had been a real prize: a straight boy, proud he didn’t have a fag bone in his body. Amanda opens it because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you get a call.
Derrick shouldn’t have her number. He asks her how she is doing. “Fine,” she says. He tells her he has someone watching her right now. That her brown roots are showing through her strawberry pink hair. That her favorite floral dress is getting splotches and she is resting her left elbow against the mailbox. Amanda focuses on the setting sun, while the corners of her eyes search for movement.
It’s an old Georgia suburb with porches covered in sand pails, beer bottles and boxes slumping from the humidity. There’s wind in the street and televisions flickering behind every window. Of course there’s movement everywhere.
Amanda breathes slow and doesn’t move. She waits for Derrick to get bored. He says she should behave herself or he’s coming over. He has friends in town. They’re recording her right now. He’ll put it up on Viddler or blip.tv if she makes him.
Take Me There Page 14
